Chapter 3: Neural Storm
The silence after Dante’s question stretched, thick with the dust of the hotel and the weight of centuries. Tony’s flat “No” seemed to hang in the air, a confession of profound ignorance. Dante stared at them, his gaze moving from Tony’s analytical frown to Steve’s cautious, searching eyes, before finally landing on Bucky. Bucky’s face was a battlefield of emotions—desperate hope warring with seventy years of learned despair.
Dante looked between the three of them, his expression unreadable. He seemed to be weighing the sheer enormity of everything they didn’t know, the chasm of explanation that lay before him. He sighed, a long, ragged sound that came from the depths of him. He mumbled, “Fuck it.”
He turned and walked a few paces to where an ancient, high-backed armchair sat askew near the remnants of a fireplace. The velvet was moth-eaten, the wood scarred. He dropped into it, the frame groaning in protest. He leaned forward, elbows on his knees, and rubbed a hand over his face, wiping away a smear of his own drying blood.
“Okay,” he said, his voice low but clear in the cavernous quiet. “You get the quick-ish version. You got questions, wait ‘til I’m done. And don’t fucking overdo it with the questions right now.” He paused, his icy blue eyes fixed on a crack in the marble floor as if seeing a different place, a different time. “In 1945, we were running operations near the front. Intel said the route was clear, but it wasn’t. Hydra had set a trap.”
Bucky felt the words like physical blows. He knew this terrain. He remembered the frozen mud, the tension in the air that day.
“My squad was already moving through the pass when the message came through—too late for them to turn back.” Dante’s voice was detached, reciting facts, but a muscle jumped in his jaw. “I ran anyway. By the time I reached them, the charges were already armed. I remember shouting for them to get down. I remember the look on their faces. Four of them lived because I threw myself into the blast. Most of the explosion hit me head-on. The others were thrown clear. When the smoke settled, they came back looking for survivors.”
Bucky’s heart felt tight, a vise of remembered grief squeezing his chest. He remembered this day. So did Steve, his face gone pale and grim. But it hit Bucky harder, a sucker-punch to a wound that had never healed.
But it hit Bucky harder, a sucker-punch to a wound that had never healed. Dante kept talking, his voice a low monotone scraping against the hotel’s silence. “They told me I was dead for eighteen minutes. My heart stopped. My breathing stopped. The field medics covered me with a tarp and moved on to the others they could still save.”
Bucky remembered the smell first—smoke and burned metal thick in the air, the kind that clung to the back of your throat. Then he saw it again. Dante lying in the dirt where the blast had thrown him, impossibly still. His dog tags hung loose around his neck, blackened with soot, catching faint light through the drifting smoke. His uniform was torn open, fabric burned and dark with blood, one sleeve nearly gone where the blast had ripped through it.
For a moment Bucky couldn’t move. His chest felt tight, like something inside him had locked up. Then he heard his own voice, quieter than he meant it to be. “Dante…” He dropped down beside him, knees hitting the ground hard, trying to keep his hands steady even though they wouldn’t stop shaking. Dirt and ash clung to Dante’s skin, streaked across his face, and his dark hair was matted with it. Bucky reached for him anyway, fingers pressing at his neck the way he’d been trained to check for a pulse.
Nothing. No breath. No movement. Just cold skin beneath the soot. For a second he just knelt there, staring, like if he looked long enough something would change. Like Dante would suddenly inhale, shove him off, bark at him to get back on his feet. Bucky whispered his name again, softer this time, the sound breaking a little as it left his throat. But Dante didn’t move. The smoke drifted across the field, the distant ringing of the blast still echoing in Bucky’s ears, and the man he loved lay silent in front of him.
And Bucky had to sit there in the dirt, holding himself together with shaking hands, realizing he had gotten there just in time to see him dead.
Bucky snapped back to reality. Dante noticed him drift, Dante wasn’t sure why. Dante never knew Bucky found him.
Dante never knew Bucky found him.
The revelation hung between them now, a seventy-year-old ghost given sudden, painful substance. Bucky’s breathing had gone shallow, his flesh hand clenched into a white-knuckled fist. A faint, high-pitched whine emitted from the servos in his vibranium arm, the plates tightening involuntarily.
Steve remembered that day too. The report had just said MIA, presumed KIA. He remembered the hollow silence in their barracks afterward, Bucky’s face shuttered and grim. He’d assumed it was the grief of losing a comrade.
Tony stared. He had looked at Steve and Bucky and also noticed Bucky's tension. It was a different tension from the Winter Soldier’s readiness; this was the vibration of a bridge collapsing inward. He kept his mouth shut, for once.
Dante made a mental note. The way Bucky had just… disappeared into himself. He filed it away, a sharp piece of a puzzle he was only starting to reassemble. He cleared his throat, the sound rough in the quiet.
“I woke up, tied to a chair.” Dante’s voice pulled them all back to the thread of his story. He leaned back in the ruined armchair, staring at the mold-spotted ceiling as if reading the words there. “Wasn’t sure where I was. Some guy came in, asked if I knew who I was.”
A humorless smirk touched his lips. “I’m an asshole and gave an asshole answer. At the time I didn’t think I died in that blast. I thought it was a dream, honestly.”
His tone flattened, becoming clinical. “Then these pricks beat the shit out of me until I died, again. Then I remembered it all. I remembered the blast. I remembered how I felt when I hit the ground. I remembered my last thoughts. I remembered my breaths slowing down and me taking my last one.”
He paused and looked down at his own hands, now clean of blood. “They told me who they were. Hydra didn’t mean shit to me at the time, I’d never heard of them. They gave me hell for years.”
He said it so casually. The way someone might mention a bad commute. “The last time they killed me, in 1950, I didn’t wake up there again. It threw me off so bad I thought I was in hysteria.” Dante chuckled, a dry, brittle sound.
“I’ll skip the semantics, I was in Hell. Like, actual Hell. It took me a long time to believe that.” He ran a hand through his dark hair, the tattoos on his forearm shifting. “I found out I wasn’t human. No shit, huh?”
He smiled, devoid of any warmth. “Who would’ve guessed the man who kept dying and coming back to life wasn’t a human… Anyways, I learned I was a Nephilim. For those who don’t know, that is a hybrid of an Archangel and basically whatever they recreate with. In my case, an Arch Angel and a witch. So I have extra juice running in my veins. Lucky me.”
The self-loathing in that last phrase was a live wire. Tony opened his mouth, a question about metaphysical biology on his lips, but a sharp look from Steve silenced him.
“They trained me, ruthlessly.” Dante’s eyes went distant, seeing epochs of fire and screaming landscapes. “Time there’s different, 10 years here is 100 years there. I ran armies. I slaughtered so many creatures and people. It was a very dark period for me. I’m not proud of the shit I did.”
He took a deliberate, steadying breath. The air in the room felt thin, charged with the scale of his confession. “I got forced by my father to have a kid, to keep his bloodline going. I had… three. Triplets. Xavier, Lucien, and Phoenix.”
He’d said four names. He wasn’t entirely lying, he had triplets, and then another son later down the road. The slip was subtle, but his jaw tightened after, as if he’d bitten down on something. “When they were born, I grew a conscience. Got myself and them out of that shit. I didn’t want them growing up that way.”
His eyes watered, a sheen of unshed tears that he didn’t blink away. He let them gather, his voice dropping to a ragged whisper.
He let them gather, his voice dropping to a ragged whisper. “At the time I thought I was doing what was best for them. I still feel like I did. But…” He let out a sigh that seemed to drain the remaining light from the room. “Might as well drop this while we’re on it, Gabriel sent more angelic pricks out for me. Was afraid I was going to burn the fucking world down.”
He barked a laugh, sharp and joyless. “If I was going to, I would’ve done that shit ages ago when I first learned how to control my powers. I fucking would’ve when… fuck…”
His breaths grew heavier, each inhale a visible shudder through his broad shoulders. A faint, hellish crimson began to bleed into the whites of his eyes, staining the icy blue. “Gabriel sent me his right fucking hand man, Michael. They found the Hydra archives, my files… they found the weapons Hydra made for me. The only ones that truly hurt me. Ones I couldn’t fully heal from. Not quickly anyway.”
Tony leaned forward, his engineer’s mind hooking onto the technical horror. “Weapons that could hurt you? What were they made of?”
Dante ignored him, lost in the memory. “My sons panicked and left… rightfully so, but… one of them, my last born, the baby of the four, he didn’t know how to teleport like them. I didn’t know he didn’t leave. I didn’t know they didn’t take him with them…”
Tony, Steve, and Bucky listened, realization dawning on them quickly. A cold dread pooled in Bucky’s stomach. He knew where this was going. He’d seen it before, in a different war, with different children.
“I heard him scream, I tried to get up, I was hurt so fucking bad… I couldn’t… I couldn’t get up…” Dante’s words were fragments now, broken by the weight of the image. “Then he was about 5 feet away from me, he screamed for me to help, he just kept calling out to me…”
Dante choked back a sob, the sound raw and animal. The red in his eyes glowed. “His wings came out, he tried to fly away. He tried so fucking hard…” A single tear traced a clean path through the dust on his cheek. “Michael threw a spear and it pinned him clean through his chest and heart to the ceiling. Then Michael left…”
The final sentence fell into the silence of the grand foyer like a stone into a deep well. It just sat there. The dust motes, caught in a sliver of light from a broken window, seemed to hang motionless. Bucky felt his own heart clench, a sympathetic, phantom pain. Steve looked away, his jaw working, a century of soldier’s grief reflected in his eyes. Tony simply stared, his usual arsenal of quips completely empty.
Dante didn’t move. He sat in the ruined chair, staring at the space between his boots, looking every one of his ninety years and more.
Bucky took a step. Then another. The creak of a floorboard under his foot was deafening. He crossed the space, the smell of old decay and Dante’s faint, clean scent of ozone and sandalwood filling his senses. He didn’t know what to say. ‘I’m sorry’ was a pebble against a mountain. So he just did the only thing that felt true.
He slowly knelt on the filthy marble in front of Dante’s chair. He reached out, his flesh hand hesitant, and carefully, so carefully, covered Dante’s clenched fist where it rested on his knee. The touch was electric. Dante flinched, but he didn’t pull away.
Bucky’s voice, when it came, was rough. “His name.”
Dante looked up, his red-rimmed blue eyes searching Bucky’s face. The confusion there was absolute.
“You told us the others,” Bucky said, his thumb moving in a tiny, unconscious stroke over Dante’s knuckles.
Dante stared at their hands, at the way Bucky’s thumb kept moving. The simple contact after so many lifetimes felt like a lifeline thrown into a black ocean. He swallowed, the sound loud in his throat.
“Seraph,” Dante whispered, the name fracturing as it left his mouth. He closed his eyes, a fresh tear escaping. “I called him Sera. Because he was… he was always so quiet. So sweet. Not built for any of that.”
The name hung in the dusty air, a sacred word in this profane place. Bucky’s hand tightened over his. He could feel the fine tremor running through Dante’s arm, a seismic vibration of contained agony.
From across the room, Steve finally spoke, his voice thick. “I am so sorry, Dante.”
Dante nodded, eyes still shut, accepting the sentiment without really hearing it. The apology was for the listener’s benefit, not his. He’d made his peace with the un-makeable years ago. What was left was just the scar, aching in certain weather.
Tony watched the interplay, the raw nerve exposed. His mind, always racing three steps ahead, connected cold data points. “The weapons Hydra made. The ones that could hurt you. They used his… his grace? His essence?”
Dante’s eyes snapped open. The crimson fire was back, flooding the blue completely in a swift, violent tide. He didn’t look at Tony. He looked at the wall, but he wasn’t seeing peeling plaster.
“They harvested it,” Dante said, the words flat and dead. “While he was pinned. While he was still alive. Michael had a vial. They called it the Godkiller project. My blood, my son’s grace… the perfect cocktail.” A bitter, broken smile twisted his lips. “The spear that killed him is one of the only things on this planet that can slow me down. Poetic, right?”
Bucky’s metal hand clenched with a sharp whirr-kt. Rage, cold and familiar, slithered down his spine. It was a different flavor than the Winter Soldier’s programming—this was personal, white-hot, and entirely his own. “Where is it?”
“Gone,” Dante said, finally looking at him. The hellfire in his gaze softened just a fraction, seeing the anger on Bucky’s behalf. “I destroyed the lab, the research, every drop they had. After I got out. After I… dealt with the people involved.” The way he said ‘dealt with’ left no room for questions. It promised finality. It promised walls painted in shades the human eye wasn’t meant to see.
He shifted his hand, turning it under Bucky’s so their palms met.